


there's no escape

by usetheforce



Series: addicted to [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-11 08:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5620069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/usetheforce/pseuds/usetheforce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking out the window at the night sky, Ben hates himself for how much he wants to see the tell-tale shape of the Falcon illuminated against the moon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's no escape

**Author's Note:**

> ben is, well. a teenager. and as dramatic.
> 
> this is a preface to a second fic that is weird, creepy porn, so if you notice weird overtures: yep we're going there.

His is a life bound up in the invisible chains called  _legacy_ and _expectation_. If he listens to the intent behind well-meaning praise, if he looks past the friendly eyes to glimpse what they truly want to see, Ben finds that he is to be an amalgamation of his lineage. They want to see the strong will of Leia and the quick-thinking of Han, combined with the self-sacrifice of Luke. They want the idealized caricatures to take hold inside his chest and _bloom_ , but instead, Ben embodies their worst traits all blended into one: bull-headed, impatient, sullen, impulsive, and furious. 

Ben lets them down again and again, and yet they still aspire for him to be better, as if the predestined outcome dictated by his DNA isn't written into skin and carved into bone. As if they have any choice in his ending at all.

They try their best all the same. On the platter of pseudo-royalty, they offer up an emulation of the mundane life, settling down where there is peace and hardly any evidence of war at all, where people are trying to  _rebuild_ under the banner of the New Republic. A Princess and a smuggler (turned generals, turned parents) sow the seeds of hopes in their son, but fail to realize that their only sprouted crop is rotten.

It's only later, on the cusp of adulthood, that Ben can realize that their well-meaning attempt had been doomed from the start. He reflects on what is and what once was, miserable, aching, stinging.

It goes like this:

 

_**Once upon a time** , chubby fingers stretch out towards the mug on the table, filled with hot chocolate spiced with tang bark, his favorite treat. He's not tall enough to reach it himself, not yet, but he has no idea of his own limitations. At this age, Ben thinks himself capable of anything, everything. He sticks out his tongue, and  **pulls** with something new inside his limbs, warm and alive. _

_The cup slides off the table and flies into the wall with a shattering crash, and it startles a cry out of him, a hand flying over his mouth, knowing he's done bad. His mother is there in no time at all, looking between Ben and the mess with knowing eyes, and kneels to make sure Ben's all right._

_It isn't the last time, but it is the first, and so Leia takes him by his still-small hands, and asks him: "Ben, have you heard of the Force?"_

 

 

_**Once upon a time** , a group of children play beneath the shade of a great tree, hitting a levitating ball with all their might. Their laughter echoes across the base, ringing careless in a free that Ben doesn't know how to reconcile. He doesn't often interact with anyone his age outside of classes, but Leia insists that making friends will be good for him, so that he doesn't feel so lonely when either her or Han are gone. _

_From the shadows, Ben watches their games, **planning** , and chews his lower lip till it's ragged. Socializing always seems to come so easy for everyone but him, and it's **frustrating** , trying to map out every action in advance, hoping that they won't deviate outside the script that he's planned. (They always do.)_

_He feels the air moving before he hears the whiz of the ball, flying towards him at top speed, an errant swing sending it out of control. Without thinking-- without **blinking** \-- Ben he throws out his hand to stop it. The Force sings in his veins so sweet, pushing on the object with disproportionate strength. It flies of off into the distance, arcing high above the heads of his peers and well into the forest._

_"Hey!" one of them says, scowling, her brows drawn low. "How're we to get that back, huh?" The others murmur in agreement, discontent rippling through the group in the form of whispers._

_(His powers are no longer unique, he knows. There's not something to be awestruck over. They are a hassle, an inconvenience.)_

_Another girl grasps at her elbow. " **Don't** , Sheera. He's done it before, we'll get another one."_

_Ben swallows thickly, turning on his heels to sulk off without a word, ears buzzing. Something ugly starts to churn in his chest that burns a lot like resentment. He listens to his own track record of destruction in shame, and wonders dimly how much his parents have had to fix or replace because of him._

 

 

_**Once upon a time,** Ben stands poised for a fight, every angle in his body a sharp one. He is both awkward and gangly, and has not yet grown into his limbs, his features, his powers. _

_"I don't want to go," he snaps, each syllable bitten out, each word a hill to die on. He looks at his father with single-minded and short-sighted hatred, all of it narrowing into a thin spike aimed at Han. They want to send him away from the only place he's ever known, and Ben **hates** it here but it's better than the unknown. Better than being away from the only people in the world who love him, even if they don't understand him. _

_"I know, kid." His dad sighs, exhausted before they've even begun. For a brief moment, his gaze flicks to the ceiling, as if he's asking why the universe why. Han navigates the words like they're a minefield, slow and careful. "But you need... training, and not the kind that your mother and I can give you. At Luke's, you could--"_

_Ben's nostrils flare and the nearest window creaks, spiderweb cracks spill across its surface. In this moment, he hates himself more than anyone else for losing **control** when he needed to have it most. How can he make them see he doesn't want to go? That he can do just fine right here, if he just tries a little harder?_

_"You're proving my point over here," Han says, smiling in a way that doesn't quite reach his eyes before growing somber. "Can't keep stumbling through this mystical energy field stuff your whole life. Even Luke had help." A big hand clasps Ben's shoulder, and through his robes it burns hot like a brand. Ben shrugs it off too fast, pulling away in a retreat._

_"I can learn **here** ," Ben snaps, irrational. "I don't need to go to the dumb Temple." Why, he implores to the void, glaring a hole through his dad's chest. Why, why, **why.** The blood in his ears grows thunderous, and the sharp tug in his chest is too easy to follow. _ _A dam bursts, and the currents of Han's unshielded mind hit Ben in the face, the memories fleeting, haunting, hurting._

> _Han and Leia fighting, her withholding something and pain in her eyes but a stab to his chest, the distance between them growing until it's a gulf._
> 
> _Han paces their shared room and feels like an animal in its cell, let out for walks and little else, the Millennium Falcon chained to Yavin 4 now that the Empire's retreated to the Unknown Regions._
> 
> _Han pining for a life that once-was, guilty and not-quite absolved just because he stayed._
> 
> _Exhaustion from a son who tests his boundaries over and over again._
> 
> _Guilt, endless, eternal, yawning, shame and guilt intermingling until they're one._
> 
> _How much Ben is a mirror of himself as a young age in so many ways--_

_Ben stumbles backwards and out of Han's mind with a gasp, heart racing, eyes glassy. He looks up at his father, at how furious as he is, and drops his gaze again, knowing that he's done wrong. The previous fire goes out of him like a blown fuse, sufficiently shamed._

_"I'll go," he says quietly, because better to be Ben the Jedi than Ben the Burden._

 

At the Temple (with a capital T, as with all things Jedi, gravitas comes first and foremost), Ben grows more recalcitrant than he's ever been at home, if such a feat is possible. He spends most of his time outside of lessons training in solitude, either in his quarters or in isolation at the nearby beach. When time permits, he meditates and fails at finding peace, the wells of it long since run dry. Sometimes, he can get Luke to talk about the glory days, and as he recants tales full of lightsabers and negotiations, Ben tries to imagine Leia and Han as something other than his Mom and Dad. (It's easy, too easy, to do so, to left his mind drift.)

Afterwards, he tries to think about what he wants for  _himself_ , and when he looks inside himself, all he finds is a growing emptiness. Young folk aren't supposed to know what they want to be, but history dictates otherwise. It won't be many years till he's the age Luke was when he was plucked from the moisture farm, and to Ben it's like a time bomb ticking, ticking, ticking. A constant fear of never being  _enough_  fill the spaces of his sighs, a time-old fear that grows larger and larger with each passing day.

 

Within a few years, Ben shoots up faster than a climbing fern scales a Massassi tree. It only serves to make him more awkward than ever: looming without intent, scowling without purpose, tripping over things in a rage.

Visits from his parents grow fewer and farther between, and he feels the loneliness keenly, an arrow embedded between his fourth and fifth ribs. He's never socialized well, and Luke is his mentor more than he is a parent, and no longer does Ben even want to  _try_ to befriend anyone his own age. He misses his mother's guidance, and his father's brusque companionship more than any grown boy should. Looking out the window at the night sky, Ben hates himself for how much he wants to see the tell-tale shape of the Falcon illuminated against the moon. Just one more time, he asks. Just one more time.

(Instead, he gets a holovid. Two separate ones, and no visits. This pattern holds.)

As a singular bright spot in his darkness, Ben's powers grow in every direction. Lifting objects at will, Ben gains a practiced ease with the push and pull rhythm required to move things-- and stop them in motion, too. His control grows more precise, diverting a singular blade of grass but not others. He looks into the minds of the unexpected, peeling away layer after layer to expose their deepest secrets, if they let him.

Luke is proud, but any praise he gives is always tempered with criticism. Power isn't everything, he says, but  _why_? Why can't power ever be enough? It's all Ben has to give. The rest is just rust and moondust. Power churns in his chest with no place to go. He _wants,_ but what he doesn't know.

 

 

What starts as brief forays into the forest to find a moment of peace and quiet soon escalates into escapism of the truest sort. It turns into racing speeders down the river until he met its mouth at the ocean, staring out at a still surface so green it could be jungle foliage. It turns into orbits around the planet with a borrowed shuttle, the nose of his ship kissing the edge of the atmosphere, so close to the sun it feels like it could almost burn away all his fears. 

It's only natural that it goes even a step further than that. Ben thirsts to see the world as someone invisible, with no expectations at all, and the shuttles are all capable of hyperspace travel. They all have trackers, he knows, serving as an invisible collar and looped around his neck, tethering him to the Temple. But if he leaves them be, and doesn't stray too far, Luke lets Ben explore, an implicit permission from someone who understood the notion of running away from his problems. 

The best time to leave, he's learned, is just a few hours before dawn. In that grey gloom, he's free to slip out of his quarters and into the makeshift hangar bay, footsteps crunching in the grass. Stony faced, he loads supplies into an old T-1 shuttle, levitating a week's worth of supplies into the hold.

He's not leaving for long, of course, and not for _real_. Sometimes he just needs to escape, so that he doesn't drown on the disappointment he leaves in his wake.


End file.
